The main background literature relevant to this invention is in the field of climbing robots. Several robots have defied gravity by climbing up the walls of buildings using specialty gripping feet. For example, the RiSE robot and the spinybot robot use microspines to climb rough manmade walls like brick, stucco, and concrete. Both of these robots, and subsequent perching airplanes, human climbing paddles, and other wall-climbing robots use linear microspines as the gripping mechanism, which is patented. Other climbing robots use dactyls, which are single rigid claws that only work on penetrable surfaces like carpet and cork, and gecko-like adhesives that only work on smooth surfaces like glass.
However, none of these robots is truly gravity-independent because they only work to counter gravity, and would fail in microgravity or in other orientations where the gravity vector is in a different direction (for example climbing on the ceiling).
There is a large field of work in robotic grasping that is tangentially relevant to this work, and is reviewed here. However, this work focuses almost entirely on grasping for manipulation tasks, like gripping objects or using tools in a dexterous manner.
Similarly, there is a very well established state of the art in drilling, even for extraterrestrial robots that is only tangentially relevant to this invention as the drill itself is irrelevant to our invention of a new method of drilling in a gravity-independent manner that is applicable to all drills.
A state of the art for asteroid and comet sampling also exist, but are all single use solutions like darts and other forms of “Touch-and-Go” samplers that do not remain in contact with the surface, but rather bounce off of it and acquire sample during the collision. Other landers that have been proposed for asteroids and comets are in fact gravity dependent like the Rosetta lander and the Hayabusa rover, even though that gravity field is small.